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- Us history to 1877
- Us history to 1877
- Ch. 3 british colonial america
The middle colonies (new york and pennsylvania)
New York was originally a Dutch colony with its major port city of New Amsterdam (now New York), major population center of New Ark (now Newark, NJ), and its colonial capital at Fort Orange (now Albany). England and the Dutch fought a series of naval wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth century over trade routes and trading posts. The end result was that England took the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York. Now New York had some problems. First, New York did not grow economically. For example, about five or six English men owned most of New York and they rented lands called patroonships. It was actually cheaper to buy land then rent however there was very little land available to purchase, so the population outside of New York City did not grow. The wealthy elite who owned most of New York did not want to sell the land because they had hoped the price would go up dramatically, so they just rented the land. However, people simply came to New York and squatted -they lived on parcels of land without having proper ownership of the land. And lad that was sold tended to have vaguely drafted boundaries between parcels of land. That resulted in another major problem: Lawyers. Lawyers flooded into New York in large measure to try land cases in colonial courts. Some lawyers sided with the squatters while others sided with the land owners. Either way lawyers got paid. Meanwhile farmers could not farm and even the port of New York was horrifically underused. Another major problem was political infighting. For example, the 1689 Leisler's Rebellion. A year before, the Catholic king of England, James II lost his throne in a bloodless "revolution (the Glorious Revolution), and fled to France. Non Catholics in the British colonies were concerned that James II, in France, would support a French rebellion in the Americas. "In New York as well, democratic movements were afoot. An armed mob seized Fort James and installed Jacob Leisler, a militia commander and immigrant from Germany, as the head of a new government. Leisler's willful personality was similar to that of Peter Stuyvesant, but for a while he enjoyed popular support because he established a legislative assembly that was not dominated by the wealthy merchants and landowners.
Leisler's rule was short-lived. A new governor was dispatched by William III in 1691. Leisler was convicted of treason and sentenced to be executed.In May 1691, Leisler and an associate were taken to the public square, which today is City Hall Park in New York City. There, before a hymn-singing crowd, they uttered their final remarks and were hanged. The bodies were taken down – the associate semiconscious – and their heads were hacked off by the executioner's axe. Supporters removed pieces of hair and clothing from the corpses as mementos, while the opponents had Leisler's heart cut out and held aloft. The heads were sewn back on the bodies and they were buried" (http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h564.html). Lesiler's supports were upset in large measure because Leisler was seen as a good governor (and New York had a long line of bad governors who had to idea how to govern or would embezzle from the treasury). Slavery was part of New York's early colonial history and at times slavery resulted in violence when slaves would rebel or when fear of a slave rebellion caused whites to kill Africans, such as in 1741. A slave rebellion was discovered and put down, but 29 Africans were killed and 70 were banished from New York. Slavery was still technically legal in the colony of New York, but after 1741 there would not be any slaves in the colony. Finally, the colony of New York created our idea of a free press. John Peter Zenger was the publisher of an anti-government newspaper called the Gazette. The Gazette was a constant critic of Governor William Cosby. In 1734 the governor accused Zenger of "seditious libel." Zenger was arrested. He hired a successful attorney named Andrew Hamilton (father to Alexander Hamilton) to defend Zenger. Hamilton argued in court that it is not libel when the truth is written. Zenger should not have been arrested just because the stories about Cosby were personally embarrassing to Cosby. The court ruled in favor of Zenger, thus establishing the idea of freedom of the press as well as our right to address the government.
PENNSYLVANIA. Chartered in 1681 and founded the next year as a proprietary colony under William Penn, Pennsylvania was originally created to be a haven for England's Quakers (the Society of Friends). The Quakers were viewed both as progressive and quaint.For example, Quakers refused to swear oaths, they were also pacifists so Quakers would typically not enter the military. Quaker women were viewed as religiously equal and thus Quaker women held leadership positions in their church, spoke publicly, and even served as ministers. In this sense, Quakers allowed so much room for women that women who wanted to work in the numerous reform movements from slavery to suffrage throughout what became the United States will join Quaker communities. Quakers were supposed to treat the Indians as human beings -namely not to steal their land but rather to buy it from them. The relationship between the Quakers and the Indians was amiable because of the Quakers’ friendliness and Penn’s policy of purchasing land from the Indians. Penn tried to protect the Indians in their dealings with settlers and traders. The relationship was so peaceful that the Quakers often used the Indians as babysitters. Penn even went so far as to learn the language of the Delaware Indians, and for nearly fifty years the two groups lived in relative harmony. However, Penn’s acceptance of all people was a double-edged sword for the Indians, because as many non-Quaker settlers came to the colony they undermined Penn’s benevolent policy. Quakers were not allowed to carry weapons unless going to hunt because weapons were viewed as an aggressive act. Finally, Quakers were the first religion in the Americans to denounce slavery. So Pennsylvania was originally designed to be a slave-free colony. People besides Quakers moved to Pennsylvania to include Germans, Scotch-Irish, and the Amish. The colony becomes prosperous rather quickly and as not all colonists purchase land from Indians, tension along the frontier is evidenced in Anglo-Indian clashes that eventually led to major warfare among the English colonists, Delaware Indians, and the French in the 1760s.
Source:
OpenStax, Us history to 1877. OpenStax CNX. Jan 20, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11483/1.1
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